Dressed in bright green vests, holding trash bags in one hand and tweezer-like contraptions in the other, university alumni Davey Rogner and Jeff Chen sung the words, “I am the trash man,” as they picked up trash on the campus yesterday as part of their nationwide tour to increase environmental awareness.
“You guys want to flash mob with us?” Rogner said to interested onlookers during yesterday’s tour. “We just picked up 11 tons of trash in three and a half weeks.”
The two alumni, with the help of Kelly Klein and Kim Alexander, kicked off a tour across the United States on March 20 in which they hope to pick up trash from Assateague Island, Md. to San Francisco. And cleaning up the environment isn’t their only goal. They hope to raise awareness about the excessive use of plastic in consumer products and how to be more effective about reusing materials. Above all, the campaign hopes to breed a sustainable culture, Rogner said at an event Pick Up America held last night.
“People have a mentality of throwing things away when they’re done,” he said. “It’s just sort of a mentality of consuming for the sake of momentary consumption but not thinking about consumption along the line.”
Chen said an experience in Yosemite National Park inspired him to create Pick Up America when he saw piles of trash lying on the side of a very frequented trail in the park. Chen and a friend decided to pick up every single piece of trash as they hiked.
“If there’s so much trash at a national park, just think about how much trash there is in our roads,” Chen said. “It sort of developed from ‘hey, we’re cross country, let’s pick up trash’ and developed to a core issue to ‘why is there so much trash?'”
The team also hopes to encourage people along its trek to replace non-reusable items such as plastic bottles and bags with long-lasting alternatives.
“Buying bottled water, it costs a lot,” Chen said. “Regardless of the economy, it just seems illogical to pay that much for water. … We use too much; we’re so accustomed to our throwaway culture. “
At last night’s event in Stamp Student Union, Pick Up America members told students about other environmental hazards that plastic poses to people and wildlife, such as the large collection of trash in the nation’s waterways and oceans and the high volumes of pieces of plastic “confetti” in rivers that are digested by animals and lead to the ingestion of Bisphenol A, a hormone disrupter that can interfere with regular body processes.
“The Anacostia Watershed is only one of two rivers in the entire nation that the [Environmental Protection Agency] lists as ‘impaired with trash,'” Rogner said.
Although its goals are serious, the members of Pick Up America hope to make the campaign anything but. The tour features activities such as music and dancing workshops, as well as community meals, and welcomes anyone who is willing to join the team in their trash-picking endeavor.
“It’s about people using art to outshine consumerism,” Rogner said. “Instead of going to the mall, how about creating something? Everybody’s capable of that. It’s just what we’re comfortable with.”
korkut@umdbk.com
